Friday, September 30, 2011

ATutor LCMS now integrated with BigBlueButton

Greg Gay, community manager of the ATutor Learning Content Management System, recently announced the ATutor integration module for BigBlueButton is now avaialble.

Thanks Greg for the integration with BigBlueButton!

Saturday, September 24, 2011

BigBlueButton + Matterhorn = Desktop Lecture Capture

Here is the announced our integration with Matterhorn at opencast.org and published instructions on how to setup BigBlueButton for lecture capture with Matterhorn 1.1 and 1.2.
If you are using Matterhorn, invite you to try the integration and give us feedback.

Monday, September 12, 2011

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta released!

The BigBlueButton development team is pleased to announce the BETA RELEASE of BigBlueButton 0.8. This release provides:
  • Recording of sessions 
  • Playback of recordings in HTML 5 
  • Improved Audio (lower latency) 
  • Integration with Matterhorn (open source lecture capture management)

For the full details, see release notes. For installation on Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit or 64-bit server, see installation instructions.

We've also put together a YouTube video demonstration how to install this beta release.

Enjoy!



Friday, September 9, 2011

BigBlueButton uses popcorn.js for HTML5 playback of recordings

Two words: popcorn.js rocks.

We've been working on adding record and playback to BigBlueButton 0.8 for months (we're almost ready for a beta). We had originally written our own HTML5 playback client for playback of slides + audio. This way, playback could occur within an HTML5 browser. By using HTML5, the playback would be very lightweight: just a series of PNG images and an OGG audio file.

Near the end of our development of 0.8, we were approached by Ben Moskowitz, a member of Mozilla Foundation, and asked if we were interested in using popcorn.js instead. popcorn.js is a javascript library for synchronized playback of media.

With the support of Mozilla, we converted over BigBlueButton to use popcorn.js (read: ditched our home grown client). The conversion went so well that we were able to add playback of chat messages.

Click the image below to see an example of playback of a recorded BigBlueButton session using popcorn.js.


Thanks to popcorn.js and the Mozilla Foundation, folks can leverage popcorn.js when remixing and creating new output formats for BigBlueButton recordings.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Presentation on Record and Playback with BigBlueButtton

Two of the BigBlueButton developers, Richard Alam and Fred Dixon, gave a talk at SC2011 - Software Developers' Haven, an open source conference held in Ottawa, Ontario, on August 27, 2011.



They presented the architecture and implementation of record and playback in the upcoming BigBlueButton 0.8.

At the time of the presentation BigBlueButton 0.8-beta had not yet shipped, but it will soon!